The building I live in has dozens of layers of paint, built from thick concrete blocks and bricks, and has poor wiring. I only know of one cell phone tower nearby and it's
Walking outside causes a significant improvement in signal strength and voice quality.
The building I live in was erected in the 1960's and doesn't have great service for Verizon or AT&T (I would know, I've been on contract with both). A bunch of dudes in the building I live in use AT&T and Verizon air cards pretty effectively. I've heard no complaints, but for now I'm sticking with Time Warner myself.
Ok now I understand what you're thinking.
I suppose you could take an MGRS coordinate and chop off the starting digits for a local area, i.e. your town/city falls entirely within the RT56 100 km^2 grid square you could tell everyone working in the area that RT56 is assumed and that 777888 will be understood as RT57776888.
The problem I can see with this approach is your in-house software and familiar reporting techniques will be alien to state and federal forces that may be called in during a disaster such as a hurricane, large riot, CBRNE event (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and High-yield Explosive), etc.
I agree that latitudes and longitudes are difficult to use, and that's why they came up with MGRS. All my professional experience with land navigation and GPS is with MGRS and it really is an easy system to learn and use.
I'll throw this out there as a Soldier recently returned from Iraq: everything gets ruined by the sand. Everything. The CD drive in my computer doesn't read most store-bought DVD's and will not burn anything. Sand got into the lens on my camera and scratched the glass when the shutter closed. My buddies work computer over there made a disturbing squeak anytime the fan turned. Another friend zapped an Xbox with the 250VDC they use over there (yeah, that one was avoidable). We had to replace all the laptop batteries for one of our Forward Surgical Teams after the heat ruined their ability to keep charge.
Bottom line: commercial electronics don't fare well in Iraq. The sand isn't like American sand - it's almost as fine as flour, not rough like sugar crystals. I haven't been to Afghanistan so I wouldn't know if it's better there but I wouldn't take anything expensive.
Another idea I'll throw out there - see what you can do for making a transformer that will work with the HMMWV's 24VDC batteries. That's something he could share with everyone in the vehicle and it'd be fun, especially as a DIY project.
Those rechargeable batteries aren't quite as reliable as people will tell you and they're heavier than the single use batteries, although in theory you won't need to take as many to the field if you have a way to recharge them (generator, solar panel). Also the single use battery is considered HAZMAT even when discharged as it may, may, explode upon contacting water so you can't just throw them out once they're used.
In the light infantry medics and RTOs end up carrying a lot of stuff (not to say the poor dude carrying a mortar tube has it easy). I sure hope this project works, soldiers and marines have a very heavy burden to carry once you add communications gear to the body armor, water, weapon, ammo, rain gear, etc. You get used to it after a while, but with stealth and mobility being the direction of modern close-quarters urban combat changes need to be made.
Cutting the weight of communications gear isn't the only way to make the modern warfighter lighter. The future may hold caseless ammo, lightweight and flexible armor, and maybe a better weapon (not saying the M-16/M-4 aren't great, but it gets heavy after carrying it all day).
The Armys FBCB2 and, by extension, Blue Force Tracking systems are all Linux-based.
Although I haven't heard an official engineering justification for using Linux in favor of a homegrown embedded OS or mobile Windows OS, but I can tell you that the computers that run FBCB2 are slow as hell these days. The Army had the technology developed years ago and used the best technology available at the time. The computers involved in that technology are outdated, but there is no real need to upgrade a working system and incremental performance boosts do not justify the cost, labor, and troubleshooting upgrades in processors, memory, and software.
Additionally, providing power to a computer in the field is a real problem. While bringing generators, spare batteries, and solar panels is the only solution to the problem itself, we can reduce downtime and maintenance time by keeping processor speed at a minimum. The same logic applies to portable gaming consoles and laptops; while it's possible to build a 3 GHz Game Boy, you wouldn't be able to power it for long enough to be portable or playable.
Yet another problem frequently encountered by is the heat. We're not talking your overclocked gaming rig with two video cards, we're talking Iraq, where summer temperatures can exceed 140 degrees Fahrenheit and even hotter inside vehicles once the air conditioning fails (and sadly, it does fail in the HMMWV sometimes).
I surprised FBCB2 hasn't made it into LinuxDevices.
Here's a video of FBCB2/Blue Force Tracking in action.
Me personally, I wish my brigade got all that high speed equipment, but given I'll probably be sitting in front of a radio playing Quake on my laptop when I go to Iraq for 12 hours a day I guess that equipment won't help.
The same goes for white phosphorus. The Geneva Convention forbids the use of white phosphorus against enemy combatants, yet the US military will turn a blind eye to a soldier shooting flares at equipment. I've heard of Rangers being told they could get away with shooting flares at rifles, radios, even rucksacks. I heard from the same person, who is a retired LTC, he bitterly opposed his Rangers looking for loopholes in the Geneva Convention, but this doesn't mean stuff like this doesn't happen.
Then there's that famous video of a terrorist getting blown up by a tank round.
I am an Airborne PFC at Fort Bragg. I haven't been deployed yet.
The first thing that came to my mind when I read the article summary was how useful this technology will be in Iraq to help soldiers cool down in the heat. One friend told me it got over to 150 degrees Fahrenheit in Tikrit when he was there last summer. Soldiers and Marines are constantly being pulled out for a few hours at a time to get quarts of saline water solution pumped into their veins through a catheter. If anything, this technology would dramatically reduce the heat casualties the Army and Marine Corps. face in the field and in training. At Fort Benning, GA, an average of three privates die of heat stroke every year in Basic Training.
Having read the article I am even more excited about the potential of this technology to enhance athletic performance of any human body. That stuff we carry is heavy, and my life will be even more miserable than most being the RTO (radiotelephone operator, which really means infantryman plus radio, similar to a medic, who is an infantryman plus field medicine kit).
If they can develop a technology for hibernating casualties before they bleed out in hopes of reviving them a few hours later may prove well worth the risks of such a practice. Too many soldiers die while they're on the bird trying to get to the hospital.
Now shooting you up with estrogen...well I guess coming home with man-tits is better than coming home in a box, but not by much.;)
Years ago NPR discussed a "killer satellite" project. NASA and the DOD had teamed up and actually built a laser capable of destroying or disabling spy satellites, but I distinctly recall the gentlemen saying that they had decided not to go through with the project. They did not want to start an expensive, pointless war in space with nations that we aren't at war with. I suppose if the USA and China or Russia really did go after each other the night sky would light up, but up to this point any intelligence gathered by other space-capable nations doesn't directly harm us.
This might be the story...I'm not sure, and I don't have time to listen to old radio broadcasts.
Although I've never had reason to do this myself, I've heard people recommend cross-compiling code onto a PPC or SPARC64 platform and then fuzz your program on those platforms to look for bugs that might not have shown up on x86.
As for your question about CORBA, look into IceC++. I read about it somewhere and it sounded cool:)
Black Adder...can you imagine Rowan Atkinson playing in a geek film? He'd be the supreme system administrator. I'm cracking up just visualizing some overpaid, underworked, narcissistic IT manager walking up whining that the UNIX systems aren't playing fair with Outlook again (you know...typical manger vs. administrator vs. technician interactions). It doesn't take much imagination to see what happens after that!
Once I looked at the website scamming PayPal (it was somewhere in South America) to see if I could get anything out of the server stats (http://example.com/server-stats) and other such Apache functions. To my horror, the Perl script that would accept input from the "verification" web page had several hundred hits. Either people are submitting bogus information, or hundreds of individuals are being fooled by these scams.
You mean that useless POS that doesn't support syntax highlighting, doesn't support UNIX or Mach formatted files, doesn't support auto-indentation, lacks spell check, lacks regular expression support, and has no features for accessibility? Operating system support of a device has nothing to do with how an application handles that device. Also, Windows 95 introduced mouse support.
Hire ex-EB/Gamestop employees. Anyone who has worked there and is a decent person will know exactly what's wrong with the company. They'll probably know more about games than random people off the street. Use this.
I've never heard of GLUI and never run into a program that used it; a more established library is GtkGLExt, and the most common GTK GL interface is gtkglarea, which has become a part of Gnome.
Client side code is ignorant until you realise your server code didn't handle error checking perfectly, then you hack together some JavaScript until you can make sense of the servers Perl scripts. Then your manager decides redundant error checking is a Good Thing and the JavaScript stays there forever.
If I were sellings ads, why the hell would I care how many people in China and India are looking at them? Everyone says they pirate software because they can't afford it - why would any advertiser waste money marketing to these people?
The only advertisers I could envision wanting to use this would be local or domestic (to that country), and somehow I don't see those advertisers being able to make "free" Windows worth Microsofts' time.
Slashdot Mirror
The building I live in has dozens of layers of paint, built from thick concrete blocks and bricks, and has poor wiring. I only know of one cell phone tower nearby and it's
Walking outside causes a significant improvement in signal strength and voice quality.
The building I live in was erected in the 1960's and doesn't have great service for Verizon or AT&T (I would know, I've been on contract with both). A bunch of dudes in the building I live in use AT&T and Verizon air cards pretty effectively. I've heard no complaints, but for now I'm sticking with Time Warner myself.
Ok now I understand what you're thinking.
I suppose you could take an MGRS coordinate and chop off the starting digits for a local area, i.e. your town/city falls entirely within the RT56 100 km^2 grid square you could tell everyone working in the area that RT56 is assumed and that 777888 will be understood as RT57776888.
The problem I can see with this approach is your in-house software and familiar reporting techniques will be alien to state and federal forces that may be called in during a disaster such as a hurricane, large riot, CBRNE event (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and High-yield Explosive), etc.
I agree that latitudes and longitudes are difficult to use, and that's why they came up with MGRS. All my professional experience with land navigation and GPS is with MGRS and it really is an easy system to learn and use.
The grid-based system you're thinking of has already been implemented for years as UTM, MGRS, and new USNG.
MGRS is used in many technologies familiar to ground troops, such as the PLGR, DAGR, and BFT.
MGRS is used for land-navigation, as described in the Armys FM 3-25.26.
MGRS coordinates are regularly used in common radio traffic, such as the MEDEVAC request, UXO/IED spot report, and call for fire.
Many consumer GPS devices support MGRS.
Hey, everyone has a right to mangle a sill-ah-bull now and then.
I've had a lot of women complement me on my Toyota Tundra, and I always answer "I have a lot to compensate for." Always makes them blush.
I'll throw this out there as a Soldier recently returned from Iraq: everything gets ruined by the sand. Everything. The CD drive in my computer doesn't read most store-bought DVD's and will not burn anything. Sand got into the lens on my camera and scratched the glass when the shutter closed. My buddies work computer over there made a disturbing squeak anytime the fan turned. Another friend zapped an Xbox with the 250VDC they use over there (yeah, that one was avoidable). We had to replace all the laptop batteries for one of our Forward Surgical Teams after the heat ruined their ability to keep charge. Bottom line: commercial electronics don't fare well in Iraq. The sand isn't like American sand - it's almost as fine as flour, not rough like sugar crystals. I haven't been to Afghanistan so I wouldn't know if it's better there but I wouldn't take anything expensive. Another idea I'll throw out there - see what you can do for making a transformer that will work with the HMMWV's 24VDC batteries. That's something he could share with everyone in the vehicle and it'd be fun, especially as a DIY project.
Those rechargeable batteries aren't quite as reliable as people will tell you and they're heavier than the single use batteries, although in theory you won't need to take as many to the field if you have a way to recharge them (generator, solar panel). Also the single use battery is considered HAZMAT even when discharged as it may, may, explode upon contacting water so you can't just throw them out once they're used.
In the light infantry medics and RTOs end up carrying a lot of stuff (not to say the poor dude carrying a mortar tube has it easy). I sure hope this project works, soldiers and marines have a very heavy burden to carry once you add communications gear to the body armor, water, weapon, ammo, rain gear, etc. You get used to it after a while, but with stealth and mobility being the direction of modern close-quarters urban combat changes need to be made.
Cutting the weight of communications gear isn't the only way to make the modern warfighter lighter. The future may hold caseless ammo, lightweight and flexible armor, and maybe a better weapon (not saying the M-16/M-4 aren't great, but it gets heavy after carrying it all day).
The Armys FBCB2 and, by extension, Blue Force Tracking systems are all Linux-based. Although I haven't heard an official engineering justification for using Linux in favor of a homegrown embedded OS or mobile Windows OS, but I can tell you that the computers that run FBCB2 are slow as hell these days. The Army had the technology developed years ago and used the best technology available at the time. The computers involved in that technology are outdated, but there is no real need to upgrade a working system and incremental performance boosts do not justify the cost, labor, and troubleshooting upgrades in processors, memory, and software.
Additionally, providing power to a computer in the field is a real problem. While bringing generators, spare batteries, and solar panels is the only solution to the problem itself, we can reduce downtime and maintenance time by keeping processor speed at a minimum. The same logic applies to portable gaming consoles and laptops; while it's possible to build a 3 GHz Game Boy, you wouldn't be able to power it for long enough to be portable or playable.
Yet another problem frequently encountered by is the heat. We're not talking your overclocked gaming rig with two video cards, we're talking Iraq, where summer temperatures can exceed 140 degrees Fahrenheit and even hotter inside vehicles once the air conditioning fails (and sadly, it does fail in the HMMWV sometimes). I surprised FBCB2 hasn't made it into LinuxDevices.
Here's a video of FBCB2/Blue Force Tracking in action.
Me personally, I wish my brigade got all that high speed equipment, but given I'll probably be sitting in front of a radio playing Quake on my laptop when I go to Iraq for 12 hours a day I guess that equipment won't help.
The same goes for white phosphorus. The Geneva Convention forbids the use of white phosphorus against enemy combatants, yet the US military will turn a blind eye to a soldier shooting flares at equipment. I've heard of Rangers being told they could get away with shooting flares at rifles, radios, even rucksacks. I heard from the same person, who is a retired LTC, he bitterly opposed his Rangers looking for loopholes in the Geneva Convention, but this doesn't mean stuff like this doesn't happen. Then there's that famous video of a terrorist getting blown up by a tank round.
I am an Airborne PFC at Fort Bragg. I haven't been deployed yet.
;)
The first thing that came to my mind when I read the article summary was how useful this technology will be in Iraq to help soldiers cool down in the heat. One friend told me it got over to 150 degrees Fahrenheit in Tikrit when he was there last summer. Soldiers and Marines are constantly being pulled out for a few hours at a time to get quarts of saline water solution pumped into their veins through a catheter. If anything, this technology would dramatically reduce the heat casualties the Army and Marine Corps. face in the field and in training. At Fort Benning, GA, an average of three privates die of heat stroke every year in Basic Training.
Having read the article I am even more excited about the potential of this technology to enhance athletic performance of any human body. That stuff we carry is heavy, and my life will be even more miserable than most being the RTO (radiotelephone operator, which really means infantryman plus radio, similar to a medic, who is an infantryman plus field medicine kit).
If they can develop a technology for hibernating casualties before they bleed out in hopes of reviving them a few hours later may prove well worth the risks of such a practice. Too many soldiers die while they're on the bird trying to get to the hospital.
Now shooting you up with estrogen...well I guess coming home with man-tits is better than coming home in a box, but not by much.
If you need proof that men know testosterone better than women, think about how men want to be Clint Eastwood, while women like Tom Cruise.
Years ago NPR discussed a "killer satellite" project. NASA and the DOD had teamed up and actually built a laser capable of destroying or disabling spy satellites, but I distinctly recall the gentlemen saying that they had decided not to go through with the project. They did not want to start an expensive, pointless war in space with nations that we aren't at war with. I suppose if the USA and China or Russia really did go after each other the night sky would light up, but up to this point any intelligence gathered by other space-capable nations doesn't directly harm us.
This might be the story...I'm not sure, and I don't have time to listen to old radio broadcasts.
Sorry, I didn't RTA.
Although I've never had reason to do this myself, I've heard people recommend cross-compiling code onto a PPC or SPARC64 platform and then fuzz your program on those platforms to look for bugs that might not have shown up on x86. :)
As for your question about CORBA, look into IceC++. I read about it somewhere and it sounded cool
You really think the head of a crackers website buys CDs?
Black Adder...can you imagine Rowan Atkinson playing in a geek film? He'd be the supreme system administrator. I'm cracking up just visualizing some overpaid, underworked, narcissistic IT manager walking up whining that the UNIX systems aren't playing fair with Outlook again (you know...typical manger vs. administrator vs. technician interactions). It doesn't take much imagination to see what happens after that!
Once I looked at the website scamming PayPal (it was somewhere in South America) to see if I could get anything out of the server stats (http://example.com/server-stats) and other such Apache functions. To my horror, the Perl script that would accept input from the "verification" web page had several hundred hits. Either people are submitting bogus information, or hundreds of individuals are being fooled by these scams.
You mean that useless POS that doesn't support syntax highlighting, doesn't support UNIX or Mach formatted files, doesn't support auto-indentation, lacks spell check, lacks regular expression support, and has no features for accessibility?
Operating system support of a device has nothing to do with how an application handles that device. Also, Windows 95 introduced mouse support.
Nah, once the power supply explodes you get famous Blank Screen of Death.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/ldap-howto.xml
I've never heard of GLUI and never run into a program that used it; a more established library is GtkGLExt, and the most common GTK GL interface is gtkglarea, which has become a part of Gnome.
Client side code is ignorant until you realise your server code didn't handle error checking perfectly, then you hack together some JavaScript until you can make sense of the servers Perl scripts. Then your manager decides redundant error checking is a Good Thing and the JavaScript stays there forever.
Oh come on, you don't want a lawsuit like Bender in Season Two, "Put Your Head On My Shoulder."
If I were sellings ads, why the hell would I care how many people in China and India are looking at them? Everyone says they pirate software because they can't afford it - why would any advertiser waste money marketing to these people?
The only advertisers I could envision wanting to use this would be local or domestic (to that country), and somehow I don't see those advertisers being able to make "free" Windows worth Microsofts' time.